Lab Management build definition restores to a snapshot but the VM is stopped

Question

I'm trying to work out an automated Build-Deploy-Test workflow using Lab Management/VS 2010 and everything is working ok... except for one small thing.

In my build definition, within the process>environment I set a snapshot that I want the environment to be reverted to before deploying, and this works fine, but when the snapshot is reverted to, the environment is stopped but not restarted.

What results is that the build waits indefinitely for the workflow capability to be available on the environment.

A temporary fix is to just watch and wait for the enivonment to be stopped, and then to start it manually and everything will proceed as expected... but this is hardly ideal.

This is happening to everyone on my team, and none of us have come across a solution. Has anyone else seen this and solved it?

Answer 1

You'll want to take the "Initial Snapshot" when the VM is actually turned on. You can do that, or you can customize the Lab default build process template and include a StartEnvironment workflow activity after the restore snapshot phase.

My suggestion would be to just take the snapshot when the VMs are turned on though. That's the way I have always ended up doing it.